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Label:This panel was part of a predella, an old Italian word meaning step, which supported the main part of an altarpiece.

Additional information:

Italian Paintings 1250-1450

The scene takes place in the temple in Jerusalem, which is depicted as an arched open loggia set in an enclosed square. Inside the temple, the Virgin hands the baby Jesus to the elderly Simeon, who, like the Holy Family, has a halo. An older woman next to them may be the prophetess Anna. Joseph is by himself to the left, and a young man bearing two turtledoves is on the right. Other figures look on the scene both from inside the temple and from the street.

Luke 2:22-39 describes how, as prescribed by Mosaic law, Mary and Joseph brought the infant Christ to the temple. They also carried with them two turtledoves, or pigeons, as a sacrifice. The late thirteenth-century Meditations on the Life of Christ, probably by the Franciscan friar Giovanni da San Gimignano, explains that the couple brought this offering because they were too poor to afford a sacrificial lamb.1 Simeon foresaw the child's role as the salvation of man, and Anna spoke of him as the redemption of Israel.

For further comments, see Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection cat. 19. Carl Brandon Strehlke, from Italian paintings, 1250-1450, in the John G. Johnson Collection and the Philadelphia Museum of Art, 2004, pp. 426-429.

Notes:

1. Meditations on the Life of Christ: An Illustrated Manuscript of the Fourteenth Century. Paris, Bibliothèque Nationale, Ms. Ital. 115. Translated by Isa Ragusa. Completed from the Latin and edited by Isa Ragusa and Rosalie B. Green. Princeton Monographs in Art and Archaeology, 35. Princeton, 1961, pp. 56-57.

Companion panel for Philadelphia Museum of Art, John G. Johnson Collection cats. 18 and 19
Predella panel of an altarpiece: Adoration of the Magi. Melbourne, National Gallery of Victoria, Felton Bequest, 1966.

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